Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Michael Moore had a short-lived television program call TV Nation. One of the bits he did was to address a social injustice. When someone has to visit the restroom at a movie theater, sex matters. Guys can go in, come right out, and miss virtually none of the film. Women, on the other hand, always face long lines to even get in the door. By the time a woman is done, she's missed a significant part of the movie she came to see just because she is a woman. That's unfair. So Michael Moore rented a flatbed truck and four super-nice port-a-pots colored pink and rolled up in front of theaters with a big sign that read "Johns of Justice" and had a bullhorn to announce to all the women inside that relief had arrived...in more ways than one...

The college did something similar recently. We have in various places on campus single user restrooms. They usually appear in pairs and until recently were divided half men's rooms and half ladies' rooms. This gave rise to the sort of unfairness that Michael Moore was concerned with. To address it, the college has left the women's facilities the same, but turned all of the men's rooms into unisex restrooms. So, there are now, no men's rooms.

Is this just? We often think that fairness requires equality, but does it? Distribution of scarce resources like this seem to turn of questions of equal access and in this case the question seems to be the length of wait or likelihood of availability. What we have is fair if the probability that someone will have to wait for a restroom, given that the person is male is equal to the probability that the person will have to wait for a restroom given that she is female. Is this the case?

That's an empirical question. Seems like we have another need for experimental philosophers...